Allen's distinctive films, which run the gamut from dramas to screwball sex comedies, have made him a notable American director. He is also distinguished by his rapid rate of production and his very large body of work.[1] Allen writes and directs his movies and has also acted in the majority of them. For inspiration, Allen draws heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema, among a wealth of other fields of interest.

Allen developed a passion for music early on and is a celebrated jazz clarinetist. What began as a teenage avocation has led to regular public performances at various small venues in his hometown of Manhattan, with occasional appearances at various jazz festivals. Allen joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the New Orleans Funeral Ragtime Orchestra in performances that provided the film score for his 1973 comedy Sleeper, and performed in a rare European tour in 1996, which became the subject of the documentary Wild Man Blues.

To raise money he began writing gags for the agent David O. Alber, who sold them to newspaper columnists. According to Allen, his first published joke read: "Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. pricesâ€”over people's salaries."[8]

He began to call himself Woody Allen. He was a highly gifted young comedian and would later joke that when he was young he was often sent to inter-faith summer camps, where he "was savagely beaten by children of all races and creeds".[7] At the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen.[9]

Comedy writer and playwright

After his false starts at NYU and City College, he became a full-time writer for Herb Shriner, earning $75 a week at first.[8] At age 19, he started writing scripts for The Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show, specials for Sid Caesar post-"Caesar's Hour" (1954-57), and other television shows.[11][12] By the time he was working for Sid Caesar, he was making $1500 a week; with Caesar he worked alongside Danny Simon, whom Allen credits for helping him to structure his writing style.[8][13]

In 1961, he started a new career as a stand-up comedian, debuting in a Greenwich Village club called the Duplex.[8] Examples of Allen's standup act can be heard on the albums Standup Comic and Nightclub Years 1964-1968 (including his classic routine entitled "The Moose").[14]

Allen wrote for the popular Candid Camera television show, and appeared in some episodes. Together with his managers, Allen developed a neurotic, nervous, and intellectual persona for his stand-up routine, a successful move which secured frequent gigs for him in nightclubs and on television.

The next Broadway hit that he wrote was Play It Again, Sam; he also starred in it. It opened on February 12, 1969, and ran for 453 performances. It also featured Diane Keaton and Anthony Roberts. Allen, Keaton and Roberts would reprise their roles in the film version of the play, directed by Herbert Ross. For its March 21 issue, Life featured Allen on its cover.[20]

Allen is also an accomplished author having published four collections of his short pieces and plays. These are Getting Even,Without Feathers, Side Effects and Mere Anarchy. His early comic fiction was heavily influenced by the zany, pun-ridden humour of S.J. Perelman.

Early films

His first movie production was What's New, Pussycat? in 1965, for which he wrote the initial screenplay. He was hired by Warren Beatty to re-write a script, and to appear in a small part in the movie. Over the course of the re-write, Beatty's part grew smaller and Allen's grew larger. Beatty was upset and quit the production. Peter O'Toole was hired for the Beatty role, and Peter Sellers was brought in as well; Sellers was a big enough star to demand many of Woody Allen's best lines/scenes, prompting hasty re-writes.

Allen's first directorial effort was What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966 co-written with Mickey Rose), in which an existing Japanese spy movie (Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi [1965] â€” "International Secret Police: Key of Keys") was redubbed in English by Allen and his friends with completely new, comic dialogue.

Annie Hall won four Academy Awards in 1977, including Best Picture and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Diane Keaton. Annie Hall set the standard for modern romantic comedy, and also started a minor fashion trend with the unique clothes worn by Diane Keaton in the film (the offbeat, masculine clothing, such as ties with cardigans, was actually Keaton's own). While in production, its working title was "Anhedonia," a term that means the inability to feel pleasure, and its plot revolved around a murder mystery. Apparently, as filmed, the murder mystery plot did not work (and was later used in his 1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery), so Allen re-cut the movie after production ended to focus on the romantic comedy between Allen's character, Alvy Singer, and Keaton's character, Annie Hall. The new version, retitled Annie Hall (named after Keaton, Hall being her given last name and Annie a nickname), still deals with the theme of the inability to feel pleasure. Ranked at No. 35 on the American Film Institute' s "100 Best Movies" and at No. 4 on the AFI list of "100 Best Comedies," Annie Hall is considered to be among Allen's best.

Manhattan, released in 1979, is a black-and-white film that can be viewed as an homage to New York City. As in many other Allen films, the main characters are upper-class academics. Even though it makes fun of pretentious intellectuals, the story is packed with obscure references which makes it less accessible to a general audience. The love-hate opinion of cerebral persons found in Manhattan is characteristic of many of Allen's movies including Crimes and Misdemeanors and Annie Hall.Manhattan focuses on the complicated relationship between a middle-aged Isaac Davis (Allen) and a 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway).

Stardust Memories features as a main character Sandy Bates, a successful filmmaker played by Allen, who expresses resentment and scorn for his fans. Overcome by the recent death of a friend from illness, the character states, "I don't want to make funny movies any more," and a running gag throughout the film has various people (including a group of visiting space aliens) telling Bates that they appreciate his films, "especially the early, funny ones."[21] To this day, Allen believes this to be one of his very best films.[22]

However, by the mid-1980s, Allen had begun to combine tragic and comic elements with the release of such films as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which he tells two different stories that connect at the end. He also produced a vividly idiosyncratic tragi-comical parody of documentary, titled Zelig.

He also made three films about show business. The first is Broadway Danny Rose, in which he plays a New York show business agent; the second is The Purple Rose of Cairo, a movie that shows the importance of the cinema during the Depression through the character of the naive Cecilia. Lastly, Allen made Radio Days, which is a film about his childhood in Brooklyn, and the importance of the radio. Purple Rose was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best films of all time, and Allen has described it as one of his three best films, along with Stardust Memories and Match Point.[23] (Allen defines them as "best" not in terms of quality, but because they came out the closest to his original vision.)

Next, he returned to lighter movies, such as Bullets Over Broadway (1994), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, followed by a musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996). The singing and dancing scenes in Everyone Says I Love You are similar to many musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1995), in which the Greek drama plays a large role, won an Academy Award for Mira Sorvino. Allen's 1999 jazz-based comedy-drama Sweet and Lowdown was also nominated for two Academy Awards for Sean Penn (Best Actor) and Samantha Morton (Best Supporting Actress). In contrast to these lighter movies, Allen veered into darker satire towards the end of the decade with Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998). Allen made his only sitcom "appearance" to date (2009) via telephone on the show Just Shoot Me!, in a 1997 episode, "My Dinner with Woody," which paid tribute to several of his films. Allen also provided the lead voice in the 1998 animated film Antz, which featured many actors he had previously worked with and had Allen play a character that was very similar to his earlier neurotic roles, only as an insect.

2000s

Small Time Crooks (2000) was his first film with DreamWorks SKG studio and represented a change in direction: Allen began giving more interviews and made an apparent attempt to return to his slapstick comedy roots. Small Time Crooks was a relative success, grossing over $17 million domestically, but Allen's next four films floundered at the box office, including Allen's most expensive film to date, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (with a budget of $33 million). Hollywood Ending, Anything Else, and Melinda and Melinda were given "rotten" ratings from film-review website Rotten Tomatoes and each earned less than $5 million domestically.[26] Some critics claimed that Allen's films since 1999's Sweet and Lowdown were subpar and expressed concern that Allen's best years were now behind him.[27] Woody gave his godson, Quincy Rose, a small part in Melinda and Melinda.

Woody Allen in concert in New York City, 2006

Match Point (2005) was one of Allen's most successful films in the past 10 years and generally received very positive reviews. Set in London, it starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Scarlett Johansson. It is also markedly darker than Allen's first four films under the DreamWorks SKG banner. In Match Point, Allen shifts his focus from the intellectual upper class of New York to the moneyed upper class of London. It earned more than $23 million domestically (more than any of his films in nearly 20 years) and over $62 million in international box office sales.[28]Match Point earned Allen his first Academy Award nomination since 1998 for Best Writing - Original Screenplay and also earned directing and writing nominations at the Golden Globes, his first Globe nominations since 1987. In an interview with Premiere Magazine, Allen stated this was the best film he has ever made.

Allen has said that he "survives" on the European market. Audiences there have tended to be more receptive to Allen's films, particularly in Spain and France, both countries where he has a large fan base (something joked about in Hollywood Ending). "In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now," Allen said in a 2004 interview. "The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films â€“ if they get a good film they're twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500 million."[31]

In April 2008, he began filming for a movie focused more towards older audiences starring Larry David, Patricia Clarkson[32] and Evan Rachel Wood.[33] He revealed in July 2008 the title of this film, to be released in 2009: Whatever Works,[34][35] described as a dark comedy, follows the story of a botched suicide attempt turned messy love triangle. Whatever Works was written by Allen in the 1970s and the character now played by Larry David was originally written for Zero Mostel, who died the year Annie Hall came out.

Distinction in the film world

Over the course of his career, Allen has received a considerable number of awards and distinctions in film festivals and yearly national film awards ceremonies, saluting his work as a director, screenwriter, and actor.[12] When premiering his films at festivals, Allen does not screen his motion pictures in competition, thus deliberately taking them out of consideration for potential awards.

In 1986, Allen won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for The Purple Rose of Cairo, and in 2009 he won the same award for Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical for Vicky Christina Barcelona. He was also nominated four times as Best Director, four times for Best Screenplay and twice for Best Actor (Comedy/musical).

In 2002, Allen received the Palme des Palmes, a special lifetime achievement award granted by the Cannes Festival and whose sole other recipient is Ingmar Bergman.[37]

In a 2005 poll The Comedian's Comedian, Allen was voted the third greatest comedy act ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

In June 2007, Allen received a Ph.D. degree Honoris Causa from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain).

Academy Awards

Woody Allen has won three Academy Awards and been nominated a total of 21 times: 14 as a screenwriter, six as a director, and one as an actor. He has more screenwriting Academy Award nominations than any other writer; all are in the "Best Original Screenplay" category. He is tied for fifth all-time with six Best Director nominations. His actors have regularly received both nominations and Academy Awards for their work in Allen films, particularly in the Best Supporting categories.

Annie Hall won four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Actress). The film received a fifth nomination, for Allen as Best Actor. Hannah and Her Sisters won three, for Best Screenplay and both Best Supporting Actor categories; it was nominated in four other categories, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Despite friendly recognition from the Academy, Allen has consistently refused to attend the ceremony or acknowledge his Oscar wins. He broke this pattern only once. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2002, Allen made an unannounced appearance, making a plea for producers to continue filming their movies in New York City after the 9-11 attacks, where he stated "I didn't have to present anything. I didn't have to accept anything. I just had to talk about New York City."[38] He was given a standing ovation before introducing a montage of movie clips featuring New York.

Title sequences

Virtually all of Allen's films since Annie Hall begin with the same style of title sequence, incorporating a series of black-and-white title cards in a vintage typeface (most often Windsor Light Condensed) reminiscent Japanese director YasujirĹŤ Ozu, set to a selection of jazz music that occasionally figures prominently later in the film's story (e.g., Radio Days). Additionally, the cast is placed on one such title card and listed in alphabetical order, and not in the order of the relative "star power" of the actors at the time in which the film was made. There is one minor variation in Deconstructing Harry, where the titles are weaved in with a looped shot. Another exception to this is Manhattan, which opens with a series of black-and-white shots of the city set to Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue"; the film's title comes after the opening narration is over.

Theater

Although best known for his films, Allen has also enjoyed a very successful career in theater, starting as early as 1960 when Allen was writing sketches for the revueFrom A to Z. His first great success was Don't Drink the Water, which opened in 1968 and ran for 598 performances for almost two years on Broadway.[39] His success continued with Play it Again, Sam, which opened in 1969, starring Allen and Diane Keaton. The show played for 453 performances and was nominated for three Tony Awards, although none of the nominations were for Allen's writing or acting.[40]

After a long hiatus from the stage, Allen returned to the theater in 1995 with the one-act Central Park West, an installment in an evening of theater known as Death Defying Acts that was also made up of new work by David Mamet and Elaine May.[42]

For the next couple of years, Allen had no direct involvement with the stage, yet notable productions of his work were being staged. A production of God was staged at the The Bank of Brazil Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro,[43] and theatrical adaptations of Allen's films Bullets over Broadway[44] and September[45] were produced in Italy and France, respectively, without Allen's involvement. In 1997, rumors of Allen returning to the theater to write a starring role for his wife Soon-Yi Previn turned out to be false.[46]

In 2003, Allen finally returned to the stage with Writer's Block, an evening of two one-acts--Old Saybrook and Riverside Drive--that played off-Broadway. The production marked the stage-directing debut for Allen.[47] The production sold out its entire run.[48]

Also that year, reports of Allen writing the book for a musical based on Bullets over Broadway surfaced, but no show ever formulated.[49] In 2004, Allen's first full-length play since 1981, A Second Hand Memory,[50] was directed by Allen and enjoyed an extended run off-Broadway.[48]

In June 2007, it was announced that Allen would make two more creative debuts in the theater, directing a work that he didn't write and directing an opera â€“ a re-interpretation of Puccini'sGianni Schicchi for the Los Angeles Opera[51] - which debuted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on September 6, 2008.[52] Commenting on his direction of the opera, Allen said, â€śI have no idea what Iâ€™m doing.â€ť His production of the opera opened the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in June 2009.[53]

Marriages and relationships

Harlene Rosen

At age 19, Allen married 16-year-old Harlene Rosen.[54] The marriage lasted five "nettling, unsettling years", from 1954 to 1959.[54]

Rosen, whom Allen referred to in his standup act as "the Dread Mrs. Allen," later sued Allen for defamation due to comments at a TV appearance shortly after their divorce. Allen tells a different story on his mid-1960s standup album Standup Comic. In his act, Allen said that Rosen sued him because of a joke he made in an interview. Rosen had been sexually assaulted outside her apartment, and, according to Allen, the newspapers reported that she "had been violated." In the interview, Allen said, "Knowing my ex-wife, it probably wasn't a moving violation". In a later interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Allen brought the incident up again where he repeated his comments and stated that the amount that he was being sued for was "$1 million".

Louise Lasser

Allen married Louise Lasser in 1966. Allen and Lasser divorced in 1969, and Allen did not marry again until 1997. Lasser starred in four Allen films after the divorce--Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) and Sleeper--and made a brief appearance in Stardust Memories.

Diane Keaton

In 1970, Allen cast Diane Keaton in his Broadway play Play It Again, Sam, which had a successful run. During this time, she became romantically involved with Allen, and although Allen and Keaton broke up after a year, she continued to star in a number of his films after their relationship had ended, including Sleeper as a futuristic poet and Love and Death as a composite character based on the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Annie Hall was very important in Allen and Keaton's careers. Furthermore, it is said that the role was written especially for her, and even the title speaks to this as Diane Keaton's given name is Diane Hall. She then starred in Interiors as a poet again, followed by Manhattan. In 1987, she had a cameo as a night-club singer in Radio Days and was chosen to replace Mia Farrow in the co-starring role for Manhattan Murder Mystery after Allen and Farrow began having troubles with their personal and working relationship while making this film. Keaton has not worked with Allen since Manhattan Murder Mystery.

After Allen and Farrow separated, a long public legal battle for the custody of their three children began. During the proceedings, Farrow alleged that Allen had sexually molested their adopted daughter Dylan, who was then seven years old. The judge eventually concluded that the sex abuse charges were inconclusive,[58] but called Allen's conduct with Soon-Yi "grossly inappropriate". She called the report of the team that investigated the issue "sanitized and, therefore, less credible", and added that she had "reservations about the reliability of the report". Farrow ultimately won the custody battle over their children. Allen was denied visitation rights with Malone and could see Ronan only under supervision. Moses, who was then 14, chose not to see Allen.

In a 2005 Vanity Fair interview,[59] Allen estimated that, despite the scandal's damage to his reputation, Farrow's discovery of Allen's attraction to Soon-Yi Previn, by accidentally finding nude photographs of her, was "just one of the fortuitous events, one of the great pieces of luck in my life. [...] It was a turning point for the better". Of his relationship with Farrow, he said, "I'm sure there are things that I might have done differently. [...] Probably in retrospect I should have bowed out of that relationship much earlier than I did".

Soon-Yi Previn

After ending his relationship from Farrow in 1992, Allen continued his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Even though Allen never married or lived with Farrow,[60][61] and was never Previn's legal stepfather, the relationship between Allen and Previn has often been referred to as a father involved romantically with his stepdaughter,[62] since he had been perceived as being in the child's life in a father-like capacity. For example, in 1991, The New York Times described Allen's family life by reporting, "Few married couples seem more married. They are constantly in touch with each other, and not many fathers spend as much time with their children as Allen does."[61] Despite assertions from Previn that Allen was never a father figure to her,[63] the relationship became a scandal. At the time, Allen was 56 and Previn was 22. Asked whether their age difference was conducive to "a healthy, equal relationship," Allen said equality is not necessarily a desideratum in a relationship, and said, "The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that".[64]

Allen and Previn married on December 24, 1997, in the Palazzo Cavalli in Venice. The couple has adopted two daughters, naming them Bechet and Manzie[65] after jazz musicians Sidney Bechet and Manzie Johnson.

Allen and Farrow's only biological son, Ronan Seamus Farrow, said of Allen: "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent...I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children."[66]

Clarinetist

Allen is a passionate fan of jazz, which is often featured prominently in the soundtracks to his films. He began playing as a child and took his stage name from clarinetist Woody Herman. He has performed publicly at least since the late 1960s, notably with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on the soundtrack of Sleeper. One of his earliest televised performances was on The Dick Cavett Show on October 20, 1971.

Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band play every Monday evening at Manhattan's Carlyle Hotel, specializing in classic New Orleans jazz from the early twentieth century.[67] The documentary filmWild Man Blues (directed by Barbara Kopple) documents a 1996 European tour by Allen and his band, as well as his relationship with Previn. The band has released two CDs: The Bunk Project (1993) and the soundtrack of Wild Man Blues (1997).

Allen and his band played the Montreal Jazz Festival on two consecutive nights in June 2008.

In 1998, the Spanish novel Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi features a party scene in which Woody Allen fidgets and stammers while explaining literary classics and the films of Federico Fellini.

In 2003, Keith Black wrote, directed and starred in the award-winning film Get the Script to Woody Allen.[68] The feature was about a neurotic young man who is obsessed with getting his script to Woody.

While not making a case for direct influence or affinity while reviewing American Splendor inspired by/about graphic artist Harvey Pekar, columnist Jaime Wolf drew attention to formal parallels between the film and subject, on one hand, and Allen, Annie Hall, and other Allen films, on the other.[69]

Psychoanalysis

Allen spent at least 30 years undergoing psychoanalysis. Many of his films contain references to psychoanalysis. Even the film Antz, an animated feature in which Allen contributes the voice of lead character Z, opens with a classic piece of Allen analysis shtick.

^Woody Allen: Rabbit Running. TIME.com. 1972-07-03. pp. 5-6 quote: "I never had a teacher who made the least impression on me, if you ask me who are my heroes, the answer is simple and truthful: George S. Kaufman and the Marx Brothers."

From Wikiquote

People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on
luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There
are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and
for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a
little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and
you lose.

Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson
Pollock, isn't it?Woman: Yes, it is.Allen: What does it say to you?Woman: It restates the negativeness of the
universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness.
The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity
like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but
waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak
straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?Woman: Committing suicide.Allen: What about Friday night?

Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all
these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more
about the big questions of life than I do ... I read Socrates. This guy knocked
off little Greek boys. What the Hell's he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of
eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live
over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll
have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It's not worth
it. And Freud,
another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing
happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in
a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the
only answer.

We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This
thing here. This is from â€” I don't remember exactly. I think it's
the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where
it's from.

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply
into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is
dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's
control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits
the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward
or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or
maybe it doesn't and you lose.

As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11 [...] it's too small,
history overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills
me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different
castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now
some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some
Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some
Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions,
if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important.
History is the same thing over and over again.

I have no apprehension whatsoever. I've been through
this so many times. And I found that one way or the other,
your life doesn't change at all. Which is sad, in a way. Because
the people love your film... nothing great happens. And people hate
your film... nothing terrible happens. Many years ago, I would... I
would... a film of mine would open, and it would get great reviews,
and I would go down and look at the movie theater. There'd be a
line around the block. And when a film is reviled, you open a film
and people say "Oh, it's the stupidest thing, it's the worst
movie." You think: oh, nobody's going to ever speak to you again.
But, it doesn't happen. Nobody cares. You know, they read it and
they say "Oh, they hated your film." You care, at the
time. But they don't. Nobody else cares. They're not
interested. They've got their own lives, and their own problems,
and their own shadows on their lungs, and their x-rays. And, you
know, they've got their own stuff they're dealing with.... So, I'm
just never nervous about it.

Fielding Mellish: You busy tonight?Norma: Some old friends are coming over. We're
gonna show some pornographic movies.Fielding Mellish: You need an usher?

Nancy: Have you ever been to Denmark?Fielding Mellish: I've been...yes, to the
Vatican.Nancy: The Vatican? The Vatican is in Rome.Fielding Mellish: Well, they were doing so well in
Rome that they opened one in Denmark.

I was a nervous child, I was a bedwetter. I used to sleep with
an electric blanket and I was constantly electrocuting myself.

I remember when I was a little boy, I once stole a pornographic
book that was printed in Braille. I used to rub the dirty
parts.

Nancy: You're immature, Fielding!Fielding Mellish: How am I immature?Nancy: Well, emotionally, sexually and
intellectually.Fielding Mellish: Yeah, but what other ways?

Prosecutor: Tell the court why you think he is
a traitor to this country.Miss America: I think Mr. Mellish is a traitor to
this country because his views are different from the views of the
president and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be
tolerated, but not when they're too different. Then he becomes a
subversive mother.

Fielding Mellish: I object, Your Honor! This
trial is a travesty! It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a
mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham! I call a mistrial
Your Honor! Do you realize there is not one homosexual in the
jury?Judge: Yes there is!Fielding Mellish: Really? Which one? Is it that
big guy on left?

Getting Even
(1971)

I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a
change of underwear.

"Conversations with Helmholtz"

My
Philosophy

Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough
finding your way around in Chinatown.

It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and
still carry a tune.

To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but
suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must
love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness â€” I hope
you're getting this down.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one
must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to
love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to
suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer,
but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must
love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness â€” I
hope you're getting this down.

Human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces
all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the
body has all the fun.

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter... if it
turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he is evil. I
think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically,
an under-achiever.

After all, there are worse things in life than death. If you've
ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know what I'm
talking about.

The key is, to not think of death as an end, but as more of a
very effective way to cut down on your expenses.

Regarding love... what can you say? It's not the quantity of
your sexual relations that counts. It's the quality. On the other
hand if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would
definitely look into it.

Where did you go to finishing school? On a pirate ship?

Sonja: "Violence is justified in the service
of mankind!"Boris: Who said that?Sonja: Attila the Hun!Boris: You're quoting a Hun to me?

Sonja: Sex without love is an empty
experience!Boris: Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one
of the best!

Countess: You are a great lover!Boris: I practice a lot when I'm alone.

Sonja: Boris, Let me show you how absurd your
position is. Let's say there is no God, and each man is free to do
exactly as he chooses. What prevents you from murdering
somebody?Boris: Murder's immoral.Sonja: Immorality is subjective.Boris: Yes, but subjectivity is objective.Sonja: Not in a rational scheme of
perception.Boris: Perception is irrational. It implies
immanence.Sonja: But judgment of any system of phenomena
exists in any rational, metaphysical or epistemological
contradiction to an abstracted empirical concept such as being, or
to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing
itself.Boris: Yeah, I've said that many times.

Him: Come to my quarters tomorrow at
three.Sonja: I can't.Him: Please!Sonja: It's immoral. What time?Him: Who is to say what is moral?Sonja: Morality is subjective.Him: Subjectivity is objective.Sonja: Moral notions imply attributes to
substances which exist only in relational duality.Him: Not as an essential extension of ontological
existence.Sonja: Can we not talk about sex so much?

Sgt: Next week, we leave for the front. The
object will be to kill as many Frenchmen as possible. Naturally,
they are going to try and kill as many Russians as possible. If we
kill more Frenchmen, we win. If they kill more Russians, they
win.Boris: What do we win?Sgt: What do we win, private?

Boris: Nothingness. Non-existence. Black
emptiness.Sonja: What did you say?Boris: Oh, I was just planning my future.

Boris: (a) Socrates is a man.(b) All men are
mortal.(c) All men are Socrates. That means all men are
homosexuals. I'm not a homosexual. Once, some Cossacks whistled at
me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both
persuasions.

Boris: Then there is a God. Incredible. Moses
was right. [a ray of light shines over Boris] He that
abideth in truth will have frankincense and myrrh smeared on his
gums in abundance, and he shall dwell in the house of the Lord for
six months with an option to buy. But the wicked man shall have all
kinds of problems. His tongue shall cleave to the roof of his upper
palate. And he shall speak like a woman, if you watch him closely.
And he shall... The wicked man shall be delivered into the hands of
his enemy, whether they can pay the delivery charge or not. And...
[ray of light turns off] Wait, I have more about the
wicked man. [turns on again] I shall walk through the
valley of the shadow of death... In fact, now that I think of it, I
shall run through the valley of the shadow of death, cos' you get
out of the valley quicker that way. And he that hath clean hands
and a pure heart is OK in my book. But he that fools around with
barnyard animals has got to be watched.

Boris: I was walking through the woods,
thinking about Christ. If he was a carpenter, I wondered what he
charged for bookshelves.

Sonja: I do believe that this is truly the
best of all possible worlds.Boris: Well, it's certainly the most
expensive.

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's
worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree"â€”probably because
it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

"The Early Essays"

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

"The Early Essays"

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that
there may be no afterlife â€” a depressing thought, particularly for
those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that
there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held.

"The Early Essays"

What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the
people in New Jersey do.

"No Kaddish for Weinstein"

Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only
food: frequently there must be a beverage.

"Selections from the Allen Notebooks"

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that
case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

"Selections from the Allen Notebooks"

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large
deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

"Selections from the Allen Notebooks"

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there
when it happens.

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf
won't get much sleep.

"Scrolls"

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or
what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

from the play "God"

Rabbi Raditz of Poland was a very short rabbi with a long
beard, who was said to have inspired many pogroms with his sense of
humor. One of his disciples asked, "Who did God like better, Moses
or Abraham?"
"Abraham," the Zaddik said.
"But Moses led the Israelites to the Promised Land," said the
disciple.
"All right, so Moses," the Zaddik answered.

"Hassidic Tales, with A Guide to Their Interpretation by the
Noted Scholar"

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. The
horrible are the cancer patients and the terminal cases... the
miserable is everyone else. So, be thankful that you're
miserable.

There's an old joke... two elderly women are at a Catskill
mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place
is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such
small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life â€”
full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness â€”
and it's all over much too quickly.

The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually
attributed to Groucho
Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and
Its Relation to the Unconscious", and it goes like this â€” I'm
paraphrasing â€” um, "I would never want to belong to any club that
would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my
adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

I thought of that old joke: This guy goes to a psychiatrist and
says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken.' And the
doctor says, 'Well why don't you turn him in?' and the guy says, 'I
would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now
how I feel about relationships. They're totally irrational and
crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it because most
of us need the eggs.

This is so antiseptic. It's empty. Why do you think this is
funny? You're going by audience reaction? This is an audience
that's raised on television, their standards have been
systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of
their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains
out!

Talent is luck. The important thing in life is courage.

I think that people should mate for life, like pigeons or
Catholics.

I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize
everything. I just grow a tumor instead.

She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father, can
you believe that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her
father.

You know a lot of geniuses, y'know. You should meet some stupid
people once in a while, y'know, you could learn something.

I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and
commit interstellar perversion.

What are you telling me, that you're, you're, you're gonna
leave Emily, is this true? And, and run away with the, the, the
winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald emotional maturity award?

It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not
desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.

"The UFO Menace"

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is
finite. This is a very comforting thought â€” particularly for people
who can never remember where they have left things.

"The UFO Menace"

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a
crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The
other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to
choose correctly.

"My Speech to the Graduates"

My
Apology

Woody Allen as Socrates...

Of all the famous men who ever lived, the one I would most like
to have been was Socrates.
Not just because he was a great thinker, because I have been known
to have some reasonably profound insights myself, although mine
invariably revolve around a Swedish airline stewardess and some
handcuffs.

Death is a state of non-being. That which is not, does not
exist. Therefore death does not exist. Only truth exists. Truth and
beauty. Each is interchangeable, but are aspects of themselves. Er,
what specifically did they say they had in mind for me?

Hey listen â€” I've proved a lot of things. That's how I pay my
rent. Theories and little observations. A puckish remark now and
then. Occasional maxims. It beats picking olives, but let's not get
carried away.

Agathon: But all that talk about death being
the same as sleep.Socrates: Yes, the difference is that when you're
dead and somebody yells, "Everybody up, it's morning," it's very
hard to find your slippers.

I'm twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi
the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells
it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to
charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.

You think the President of the United States wants to fuck
every woman he meets?... Well, bad example.

No, I don't think you're paranoid. I think you're the opposite
of paranoid. I think you walk around with the insane delusion that
people like you.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

[On being called a self-hating Jew] Hey, I may hate myself, but
not because I'm Jewish.

Doris: You have no values. With you its all
nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.Harry: Hey, in France I could run for office with
that slogan, and win!

Standup Comic
(1999)

A CD compilation of Allen comedy routines from
1964-1968

A lot of things have happened in my private life recently that
I thought we could review tonight.

I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between
five, it's fantastic.

A fast word about oral contraception. I was involved in an
extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked
a girl to go to bed with me, she said "no."

Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and
she'd come in and sink my boats.

I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would
have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian
and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you
miss.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics
exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

I'm not a drinker â€” my body will not tolerate spirits. I had
two Martinis on New Year's Eve and I tried to hijack an elevator
and fly it to Cuba.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They
rented out my room.

Mere
Anarchy (2007)

How could I not have known that there are little things the size of
"Planck length" in the universe, which
are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a
centimeter?

How could I not have known that there are little things
the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which
are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter?
Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be
to find.

And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly,
would certain restaurants still require a jacket?

With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand
dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud
while rivaling it in possible interpretations.

I have also reviewed my own financial obligations, which have
puffed up recently like a hammered thumb.

She quarreled with the nanny and accused her of brushing
Misha's teeth sideways rather than up and down.

As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey
Sandwich as the height of licentiousness.

I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and
characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground
out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be
better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping
bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum.

Bidnick gorges himself on Viagra, but the dosage makes him
hallucinate and causes him to imagine he is Pliny the
Elder.

To a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker
than to a man on a boat â€” especially if the man on the boat is with
his wife.

Quotes about
Allen

In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to
paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a
patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American
filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody
Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright,
stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.

With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily
(1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his
own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has
ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's
always been serious. It's the audiences who have been
frivolous.
In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and
moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in
which he delights but which can be infuriating to others.
Zelig is a nearly perfect â€” and perfectly original â€” Woody
Allen comedy.

His many works and his cerebral film style, mixing satire and humor, have made him one of the most respected film directors in the modern era. Allen writes and directs his movies and has also acted in most of them. To inspire himself for his movies, Allen uses literature, philosophy, psychology, Judaism, European cinema and New York City, where he was born and has lived all life.